Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson is a 1983 TV movie produced for HBO featuring Jackie Gleason and Laurence Olivier and was directed by Alvin Rakoff.The film is set at Halpern's (Olivier) wife's gravesite after the funeral. Halpern, a working class British Jew, is incensed when Johnson, a dapper American (Gleason), turns up with flowers for the deceased, rather than stones as in Jewish custom. When Halpern demands to know how Johnson knew his wife, a long conversation ensues that reveals one has been in love with the other's wife for 30 years.
There are two scenes in the movie, a New York hotel and a New Jersey cemetery. The hotel scene was filmed at the HTV West studio on Bath Road in Bristol, England and the cemetery scenes were filmed outside Bristol.
Rabbi Kenneth L. Cohen was the religious advisor for the film.
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“I am not able to instruct you. I can only tell that I have chosen wrong. I have passed my time in study without experience; in the attainment of sciences which can, for the most part, be but remotely useful to mankind. I have purchased knowledge at the expense of all the common comforts of life: I have missed the endearing elegance of female friendship, and the happy commerce of domestic tenderness.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)